Apparently, this is the time of day when Maia likes to sleep. Yesterday she slept for several hours from 4 until 7, and today she went to sleep at 2:30 and is still asleep at 5:45 (and I took the opportunity to nap with her today; lesson learned!)

She’s been fussy for the last two nights, and I’m not sure why. Last night alone, between 11:30pm and 7am when I finally gave up, she had three wet diapers and didn’t sleep more than 90 minutes at a time. I felt like I was just a pair of boobs to suck on and a pair of arms to fall asleep in. Georgia, my midwife, says that Maia is just going through a growth spurt (she’s up to 9lb 6oz, which means she’s put on 10oz in the past week alone) and so she’ll want to eat a lot — but it feels like she has been going through a growth spurt and feeding this much since the day she was born.

I really shouldn’t complain at all about the fact that I have a baby who feeds so well. I just wish I understood why she’ll only sleep in short periods at night, but she takes 3+ hour long naps during the day. I feel like I must be doing something wrong with trying to establish her sense of “dark is a good time for sleeping”.

When my mom was here, we noticed that Maia passes out for hours after a bath and so we should probably bathe her shortly before we want to go to bed, but Chris and I haven’t been following through on that (I know, what a surprise, right?). Still, I think we were both so frustrated with last night’s constant wakefulness that we really, really need to make the effort to soothe her to sleep with a bath.

When you get to the point when you’re ready to complain, just do it. Get the guilt out of your system. You’re still a wonderful mom even if you can’t stay positive about everything all the time. We’ve all been there and completely understand how that feels. I think it was around week three that I was hit with the understanding of what “lack of sleep” really meant.

But I also remember reading (because I’ve already started forgetting) that it takes a while for their internal clocks to get used to sleeping at night because they were used to sleeping during the day in utero (while we moved around) and they’d wake up at night (while we were still).

Galasaid,

Keep working on getting Maia on a schedule. Nothing drastic, but slowly. Like the bath thing…and that the house is quite and rather dark at night. No matter how many times she wakes in the night, I would still keep the house in “bedtime” mode. It is hard to make yourselves establish a schedule because right now you and Chris can sleep whenever you like. But, when Chris goes back to work, he will be grateful that some type of schedule is being worked at. You want to set the schedule, not Maia. It will make life much easier in the long run. That being said–happy two week bday to the most beautiful granddaughter in the world! 🙂

Hang in there! Lauren was like she was on a growth spurt solidly for the first month I think, it does calm down. The fact that she CAN sleep for a few hours at a time is a good thing, and eventually she will do that at night as well as during the day.
Bath before bedtime is a great habit to get into, setting up that bedtime routine is one of the things that everyone seems to agree on (though it’s taken us three months+ to get around to doing it ourselves… lol).
You sound like you’re enjoying it all, it’s wonderful 🙂